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The Standard of the Black Knight
“The Black Knight always triumphs!” I should probably say “spoilers ahead,” even though the movie is 44 years old. Also, those of you looking for transcendent inspiration should go elsewhere.
We open with King Arthur traveling through the forest, where he encounters the Black Knight. This massive warrior is guarding a ridiculously tiny bridge over a minute, apparently dry brook. As the scene opens, the Black Knight dispatches an adversary after a ferocious battle. The King naturally asks him to join the knights of the round table, only to be met with stony silence. Arthur tries to proceed, but the knight blocks his passage with a thunderous “None shall pass” and the fight is on.
Arthur quickly lops off the knight’s left arm, but Blackie refuses to give up. He continues to attack and the King eventually severs all his limbs. Even so, he taunts Arthur: “Come back here and I’ll bite your legs off.”
The group I hung out with in college were fanatics about Monty Python and the Holy Grail and quoted lines from the movie ad nauseum. Any physical mishap on the intramural courts or fields would be met with a stoic “’tis but a flesh wound,” or “I’ve had worse” from the injured player. Our defensive line in football would chant “None shall pass.” (With about as much effectiveness as the original. I think we won one intramural football game in the two years I played.) Taunts from the opposing team would be met with “What are you going to do, bleed on me?;” and, as inevitably happened, we were getting our rears handed to us, someone would pipe up with “Okay, we’ll call it a draw.”
I’ll bet most of the frat boys and business majors who played against us thought we were nuts. Even so, in this supposedly enjoyable activity, we always seemed to have more fun losing than they did winning.
This also gave me a lifelong standard for judging movies. If your supposed masterpiece doesn’t have as many memorable lines as this one scene, it’s not quite up there in the Pantheon.
Published in Humor
“How do you know so much about swallows?”
“You have to know these sorts of things when you’re king, you know.”
Your standards might be somewhat higher than mine, but I do use the same metric.
He can’t do that to our pledges.
Only we can do that to our pledges.
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Now, she should be good-looking. But we’re willing to trade looks for a certain … morally casual attitude.
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Every Halloween, the trees are filled with underwear … every spring, the toilets explode.
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The time has come for someone to put his foot down, and that foot is me.
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Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
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Over? Did you say over? Nothing is over until we decide it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
“She’s got huge… tracks of land!”
There was a time when I could quote every line from an audio cassette of Monty Python skits. I could even do the accents.
The black knight sketch came to mind this morning while I watched a preview of familiar gameplay in an upcoming Far Cry video game. In it, the player as protagonist can not only shoot enemies and run them down in vehicles but can also stealthily kill one with a big knife or set one aflame with a molotov.
In a Monty Python reunion interview, John Cleese said the graphic violence in the black knight scene is okay because there is no pain. The portrayal is sufficiently unreal that it seems more cartoon than drama.
Likewise, violence in video games depends on clear distinctions from reality. It is fun in Far Cry, for example, not only because the enemies are detestable but because the dying characters don’t act as real people would and the violence is not so gruesome as reality. It is still too brutal for many gamers, like the black knight scene is too gruesome for many movie lovers. I never enjoyed slasher films, myself.
Anyway, game designers like film makers are increasingly tempted to drift too close to reality as improving technology and special effects enable it. Modern storytellers have to be more deliberate about how characters act and react in violent scenes. How funny or dramatic does it need to be for each scene?
In other words, “That rabbit’s dynamite!”
There are so many “B” films from that era that would never see the light of day in the current climate of stupidity. I am surprised no one has pull down the statue of Mel Brooks yet….
This was my old phone test message notification:
But you over 50 guys already knew that.
Can’t believe we’re this far into the post without a mention of “Bring Outcher Dead!”
I was the same way in college with the Holy Grail. After graduation, I stayed in town with my job. A couple years later a theater had a midnight showing of the Holy Grail. It was like a small reunion with a lot of others who’d stayed in town.
“The Germans?”
”Forget it, he’s rolling.”
“It’s just a flesh wound.” I included this in a comment I made this morning as it happens. A classic.
“It’s a fair cop.”
I still say that… a lot, for everything. Nobody gets it.
You hang out with a bad crowd.
A sad crowd…
It’s like: “We’re gonna build you a big, beautiful wall. With huge [tracts of land].”
“She turned me into a newt!”
The Holy Grail was the funniest movie ever made, until they made The Life of Brian. It is physiologically impossible not to laugh while watching this:
“A newt????”
”I got better.”
“When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. And that one sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Son, the strongest castle in all of England.”
How many of y’all know the undertaker skit? Or the travel agent sketch? Crunchy frog? The string sketch?
String Owner (who inherited miles of it): “Well, it’s only string.”
Advertiser: “Only string? It’s everything! It’s waterproof.”
Owner: “No, it isn’t.”
Advertiser: “It’s water resistant.”
Owner: “It isn’t.”
Advertiser: “Okay, it’s water absorbant! Super absorbant string! Away with floods!”
Owner: “You’re mad!”
“Simpson’s individual pre-sliced string-ets!”
Each one contains a real frog?
Yes, a dead frog.
Well don’t you even take the bones out?!
If we took the bones out it wouldn’t be crunchy then, would it?
Funeral cost? That depends. You want Burn ‘er, Bury ‘er, or Dump ‘er?
Dump her??
Dump ‘er in the Thames. Yeah, you wouldn’t like that one, it’s nasty. So which is it?
I’m not sure.
Where is she?
Here in this sack.
(peers in)
Fred! I think we got an Eater!
(from the back)
Right! I’ll get the oven on.
Um, wait. Are you suggesting we should eat my mother?!
Not raw, not raw!
I’m Bounder of Adventure!
I’m Smoke Too Much.
I’m sorry?
I’m Smoke-Too-Much.
Well, you’d better cut down a little then.
I beg your pardon?
You’d better cut down a little then.
Oh, I see! Smoke too much, so I’d better cut down a little.
I expect people make fun of yourname all the time, eh?
No, it never struck me before. Smoke too much . . . . hahahahaha! Good one!
Did I get them all?
I set, you spike.
Okay – I have to. Apologies aforethought.
We are not going to sit here and listen to you bad mouth the United States of America.
“Judean People’s Front? We’re the People’s Front of Judea!”
“Splitters!”